The Companion

by Lorcan Roche

  And thinking too much about the same things always you fear relapse, reversal.

  Remain indoors therefore, stay underwater breathing. Float on the back of the passive-aggressive sea. Talk to people paid to listen, indolently. Choose the most deserted times of day and night to walk the faithful slow dog. Wave at the butcher on the shore. Nod at the doctor at the crossroads. Try hard to think of something light to say to the overweight girl at the supermarket check-out, then watch as she takes her ‘Till Closed’ sign and places it in front of your basket, like a dam.

  Go for a drink with the man who sells second-hand albums and watch your healthy pint go yellow as his mustard-gas breath, and his ugliness, seep in.

  Feel yourself on a conveyor belt moving from bed to bus to concrete lecture hall. Feel knocked down because it won’t be long now, won’t be long before you will no longer garden with her, cook with her, chop for her, slice, dice.

  Sacrifice. And Ritual. Fading.

  No longer able to hold her hand. No longer able to lie beside her.

  Laugh with her.

  Lie to her.

  Go out running in new trainers. See it up ahead, perceive it as a haze, tell yourself you can run through it, you know you can beat it – yes you can – you know you can beat it in your heart you know you can –

  Never really beat it. Now that she is gone.

  ‘We’re upping your medication, Trevor. Don’t be too surprised if your breath arrives slightly sour in the morning’ and your mouth is sticky and sometimes you wake up after twelve hours kip completely exhausted with caked white shit on your lips and your piss is nearly as yellow as Ed’s some days you can’t stand up too quickly or you’ll get dizzy and nearly, very nearly, spin back to the slanted, kneeling point at which it all began.

  But you see, after a while, they work. After a while you are not so easily undone. Things cannot take root. You forget some days to feel afraid with strangers. You strike up conversation the way you strike a match on a windless day.

  First-time. Fuss-free.

  You fit in easily, even though you need a pill to do so. Who cares? Half the western world self-medicates on a daily fuckin’ basis. The rest get high on Power, Money, Illusion.

  Sooner, much sooner than you thought, you find people turn and smile when you say the locked-up thing that was hastily scribbled on your mind sometimes they even laugh out loud, and it’s beautiful in your ear reverberating, and you can hear her laughter echoing down there too, and she’s with you, always.

  And you regularly experience what could very easily pass for pure, unadulterated joy coursing through chest and shoulders; alone at the cinema laughing, in the gym straining, training your mind in the morning not to be undone by the first thought that enters, feeling it being replaced gently with something new and hopeful in the corridor with his OJ balancing, bathing him, watching over him, feeding him, forgiving him, loving him, helping him to live.

  And die.

  Then you realize, shit, this joy is not yours, it is borrowed. And like all things borrowed you will have to give it back.

  No. I’ll hold on to this fleeting feeling, I will own it. I’ll cling to it even after the moment is gone, I’ll hold on to the memory of happiness, don’t ask me how, and in the process you start to get stuck again. In the past.

  And so, you learn to live in two places at the same time.

  Open up.

  Disclose to others what’s really going on inside, kiss and tell, show them your past catching up, reveal the mist swirling round the wheel turning slowly, and they’ll happily, merrily inform you that you’re wrong. Oh yes, my son, you’re wrong. About yourself.

  People don’t like truth. It’s ugly, damp and old and it has a hacking cough that won’t go away. It keeps them awake at night they run away from it, Gee, is there really a cemetery there? I always thought we just had the mountains and the sea.

  Women construct ingenious careers avoiding truth. They mother lies, they nurture compromise.

  Men refuse to acknowledge it, then are reduced to tears in book-lined offices by truth standing there in short trousers.

  Judges have their heads turned by it. Nurses inject it.

  And children? Children stop playing when they hear the truth whispered on the wind, bells stop ringing in the cathedral votive candles flicker, and die.

  And in the confessional the priest’s astonished mouth opens, and shuts slowly, when he hears the truth.

  For fuck’s sake. Look at the lies my mother told me.

  Look at them, casually overflowing.

  You’re right, I have been holding back, I have been lying, by omission. But you see, I know from past experience that if you open up wide and say aaah too quickly, if you reveal too much of yourself too soon then people will see you’re a timber wolf who’s been out in the forest too long, you’ve been licking your wounds too much, the only taste you know now is regret.

  Better to emerge slowly, to shake the snow and the past from your pelt, better to come into the light after breakfast when they’ve eaten and their semi-civilized stomachs are full, and they’re not immediately, keenly suspicious.

  Better to learn to walk slowly, to hang your massive head low, better to keep your startled eyes averted.

  Cats know the deal. They pretend to be sophisticated, domesticated. They sit all day cleaning, preening and purring when, really, they’re just waiting for night to fall. Cats see in the dark. But what they see is themselves, the way they saw it in their daydreams, descending,

  You haven’t a fuckin’ clue what I’m banging on about, do you?

  Who do you know that tells the truth? No one does, not in this city.

  Here, everybody lies. The taller the building, the greater the lie that built it. Monuments to deception. Cathedrals to delusion and denial.

  The uniformed doorman lies when he smiles as you enter, the uniformed priest lies when he touches your forehead.

  Ego te absolve.

  How, Father, where’s your magic wand?

  The President lies on TV. The Prime Minister lies beside him. Everybody does it. Ice-skaters are we, sticking to safe areas on the rink where it’s possible to think without panic, to pirouette and perform. But as we leap about we know we are busily distracting all eyes from the thin, exposed areas of ourselves where we will always fear to tread, especially as we collapse into our Lazee-Boy recliners.

  And reach for the remote control: just that moment, when the TV briefly ignores the thumb depressing.

  We lie, mostly to ourselves.

  The Judge manages it by staying out of Ed’s room. By picking up the little phone to his wife instead of walking down the corridor to be confronted by the grotesque reality of how lies twist and grow.

  Ellie lies to herself by getting lightly stoned each day, by asking me needle-questions about my life, my direction, my folks back home. What about her life? Where are her kids? Where’s her husband, where have her dreams of a soul-food kitchen gone?

  Up in smoke.

  And Ed?

  He lies when he says he won’t hit the panic button unnecessarily. Then, when he wakes me up for the fourth time, he says he can’t help being afraid, he says he’s really fuckin’ sorry man but it really felt like someone was there, breathing, staring, standing over him again.

  Ed lies when he says he won’t buzz me too early in the morning, or when I’m in the shower, or on a break sipping nice cold milk. He says he won’t disturb me, he knows I’ve earned it, he realizes it all gets to me too, he sees I need my sleep, my space, my own company for a while.

  So tell me, who’s that on the phone?

  Ed?

  Or Tony fuckin’ Soprano?

  I lie to myself naturally I also lie to you.

  I skate, and jump, and land with a thump on my huge feet I’m forced to stick to very thick ice; if I go out farther, if I venture out beyond, even a little, I’ll be forced to watch the surface crack and run. Then, so will you.

  You’ll see it sp
reading. You’ll start checking around for your car keys – yes you will – you’ll discreetly tap your coat pocket thinking that I won’t notice, you’ll steal a glance at your watch or your mobile phone then you’ll start to walk away. Maybe you’ll turn around, maybe you’ll give me one of those brave little smiles, maybe you’ll say, I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would turn out this way.

  Or the perennial, the old reliable: You know Trevor, I thought it was going to work out different.

  Newsflash: So did fuckin’ I.

  In The Subway Inn, every time I buy a beer the barman makes a big fuss of buying me one in return, even though it’s not his fuckin’ money. At the end of the night he knocks back three shots of cheap malt whisky, says he needs it for the subway ‘Helps deal with all doze animals.’

  I do the three shots with him, even though I can’t stand the paraffin taste when my head tilts back I’m thinking, Why the hell am I doing so many things I really don’t enjoy?

  I have the power to make people feel safe but I also have the power to make them feel afraid.

  Sometimes I knock back the malt, then after The Subway Inn gets shuttered up for the night, I stand on the pavement like a totem.

  I am a rock. They must divide and swim around me, even couples holding hands must be rent asunder. Dyed blondes in cheap denim jerk their stoned boyfriends into place, ‘Don’t say nothin’. He’s twice your fuckin’ size.’

  Sometimes I walk the bitter barman down to the tracks and wait with him, and I don’t avert my eyes. I stand and stare, I dare the animals to keep looking and I’m secretly hoping one of them will say, ‘What’s your fuckin’ problem, pal?’

  Sometimes who you stand waiting with says an awful lot about you.

  12

  It’s weird, with all the working out, with all the protein Ellie packs into me on a daily basis, this is the strongest I’ve ever been, I mean some evenings I amaze myself at the way the weights keep stacking up; I can see it in the steady way the black and white body-builders hold my gaze and nod, almost respectfully.

  But I’m not feeling all that mentally strong. It might be the fact that these days Ed’s mood swings are extremely erratic, might be that my hours are quite chaotic, might be something really simple like the fact that I’m attempting to give up smokes and steer clear of The Subway Inn, which isn’t easy. Because at the end of a long shift I really need to forget him.

  Maybe it’s the Greek-heat of this city, it really is unbearable. It makes it impossible to strike up conversation – if there actually was anyone to talk to. Because, after half past five, streets are already sullen, and absolutely empty. And you feel it’s the end of the world, that everyone else is at an amazing party out in the Hamptons, that they’re all getting laid, gymnastically, between 300-thread Egyptian cotton sheets and afterwards they’re sipping Long Island iced-teas or delicately salted margaritas. And The Dynamic Duo – which is pathetic Ed, and even more pathetic you – are the only fools who didn’t get invited.

  RSVP.

  Ed has no stories to tell, none whatsoever.

  But neither would you if you never had sisters, never sat in a dwarf-sized desk at school and relentlessly flicked the fruit-bat ears of the teacher’s pet in front, never jabbed a compass up his spongy ass if he so much as threatened to complain. And you’d have no stories to tell if all you’d ever had was a private tutor, and you’d never let loose a hundred white mice down long polished corridors, or never made kung-fu stars in metalwork class and thrown them into the steaming, bovine crowd at rugby matches, waiting for the scream. Or tied fishing wire to a neighbour’s door knocker and kept her awake all night. You’d have no tales to tell if you never had a dog that ran beside you and chased down pale hares, and you’d never lived by a beach and searched among twisted driftwood for bottles with notes in them, or you’d never had a boomerang, or been the Star Performer on a swimming team, or been to college, even briefly, or enjoyed hash days off from yourself, or floated on the sea, like a cork, after winning a race. Or been caressed by an actress with a perfect body, Charlotte Rampling cheekbones and a sexy Anglo-Irish accent. Or if you’d never stood up in front of a class of people in chairs with no arms and screwed-on-sideways heads and felt yourself, reinvented.

  And you’d have no tales to tell if you never sang songs with your laughing mother coming back from the red painted town.

  And it doesn’t matter if your old fella is rich as Croesus, or if you once had a private recording studio in your bedroom that had to be flogged off to make way for all the machinery needed to keep you barely alive; it’s all fuckin’ pointless. Because the truth is, you’re dying. And not the way everyone else is dying, day by day; no, you’re expiring by the hour, the second, and each foetid breath you exhale takes you closer to the moment, and you’re not noble and all that shite in The Tibetian Book of Living and Dying because you never really lived, you simply were born then began to die, post-haste.

  And some days you’re so angry you can literally hiss and spit, especially at incredibly healthy fuckers like me who’ve never been physically sick, not one single solitary day.

  And you want to lash out, you want to be cruel, and callous, to injure and inflict as much as your mean little spirit will allow.

  And maybe the only joy you know is the peace that comes after an argument, the feeling of things being washed away by coarse, salty tears.

  And you wish you could bleed to death heroically, not just leak like a stain into the carpet.

  There are days when I don’t assist, when I don’t react to his tirades, his name-calling, his incessant, childish yammering for attention. Days when I just smooth the cold pillow for his dying face, days when I look down at the carpet and let him shake, and jolt, when I literally watch him sweat.

  See pores open, see poison pouring out.

  I hear conflicting voices then: Go to him, please hold him, followed by: Nah, just watch the little prick shiver an’ hopefully shrivel and die.

  This will always have been precipitated by him being unusually cruel; I told Ed far too much at the beginning I laid myself bare, made myself weak in order to make him feel big and strong.

  It was a mistake.

  I’ll never make it again, because when you make yourself small and worthless, and when you finally rise up, the shadow you cast on the wall when the house is fast asleep may not be the shadow you expected to see at all.

  13

  Unlike Ed, I have plenty of stories to tell. This one’s about Control:

  The first time I really felt it slide, like ice inside glass, was when my mother called me in and told me that she wouldn’t be going into town on Mother’s Day, that it had come back again, there was no point pretending.

  I tried to be strong, I stood there really tall and she told me I looked amazing, I was getting a real Olympic-swimmer’s silhouette, ‘like yer man Mark Spitz, do ya remember him Stretch? No, you were probably just a kid.’

  But the truth is, standing there I might have looked like a man but really I was still a child inside and I felt incredibly weak and dizzy, as if I’d just smoked grass someone had mixed with horse tranquillizer.

  I didn’t sleep for three days, not properly, even though Ma gave me a few of her sleeping tablets, but they didn’t work and my head was groggy, and there was no point going to college so I’d stayed on the train past Dun Laoghaire, on into the dirty, low-slung city. And now I was sitting alone in a bar called The Harp, raising a dead pint to my lips when I heard this calming voice telling me to call it a day, to head on home.

  I picked up my crombie and moved slowly to the door. My back was stiff, my feet trudged, my laces were undone and seemed too far away to be worth the effort. There were spots in front of my eyes, I don’t think I’d eaten anything solid in twenty-four hours.

  I was pale and shaking. I couldn’t seem to get the fucking coat to fit over my hoodie.

  One of the bouncers – and I think it was because earlier I didn’t get out of his way w
hen he was walking to the gents and I didn’t seem suitably terrified by his pale eyes – decided he’d have a bit of fun with me. He starts helping me into my coat, and I know what he’s going to do, he’s going to wait until my hands are half in, and he does, then he starts to tie me up in the fabric, he gives me a few little slaps, ‘Oops-a-daisy, sorry about that pal, oops, silly me, there I go again.’

  His hands are fast, and light. But they’re the size of a ten-year-old girl’s.

  The other bouncers, these beer-bellied red-faced fuckers at the door, they think this is hilarious. They clearly believe he’s the new Peter Sellers, ho-ho-ho, so he ups the ante, he starts to slap me on the back of the head saying all the while he’s hitting me gently, ‘You big overgrown dose, you big, clumsy, stupid dose ya.’

  He stops, dusts me down, looks over at his eternally appreciative audience.

  When he looks back, his pale blue eyes are smiling, perhaps expecting me to nod and laugh.

  I don’t laugh. Instead, I stand up very straight, which hurts. Then I stoop down quickly like a bird I cleave his crinkly forehead with the top of my head.

  Rock. Paper. Blood.

  He falls to his knees. Worshipping.

  With my left fist, because my right is still inside the coat, I break his nose, right down on the bridge, the soft spot.

  They really went to work on me and I couldn’t get up no matter how hard I tried and I couldn’t think and it wasn’t all slow anymore, it was really quite fast and blurred especially when Ol’ Blue Eyes re-entered the fray and the black boots and white fists took on a more urgent, disco rhythm.